This chapter is taken from Living Political Ideas (eds) Geoff Andrews and Micheal Saward published in association with Edinburgh University Press (2005) as part of a series of books which forms part of the course DD203 Power, Dissent, Equality: Understanding Contemporary Politics.

By valuing a group positively and seeking self-determination for it, nationalists often set out to redraw maps, to create new countries or to reinstate old ones. It is rare for this to occur without (often violent) conflict. Can political theorists offer guides to dealing peacefully with such disputes?

One question which political theorists have focused on has been that of secession. Secession as an issue carries with it most of the dilemmas associated with nations and nationalism, and

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There is a strong case for regarding the third element in the ‘core structure’ of nationalism as the key one. Generally, as we have seen, nationalists want their nation to have a state, or statehood. But political self-determination might have other outlets.

From the comparatively ‘soft’ demands to harder and less compromising ones, the spectrum might consist of some form of:

recognition of the cultural distinctiveness of a ‘na

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No particular form of articulating the nation is required by the formulation of this first element; the nation might be ‘imagined’ or ‘constructed’ as homogenous or as pluralistic and diverse, for example. However nationhood is imagined, though, it will invariably involve some form of suppression of alternative ways of classifying peoples. Consider that for most of us there are linguistic, class, ethnic, location, gender, religious and other aspects to our identities. If nation

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This unit is based on a chapter from the book Living Political Ideas, which is part of the current course DD203 Power, Equality and Dissent. It really attempts to do two things at once. It is about the core concepts and processes with which human groups that think of themselves as nations challenge the existing order and assert their right to a state of their own. And at the same time it is a kind of gentle introduction to how to study political ideas. It is more theoretical, or

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Although it is known that a round hole in a flat sample will theoretically produce a stress concentration of about 3, the issue was decided experimentally. A tensile test at 25 °C was undertaken on an intact eye-bar-pin assembly from the bridge, being some 8 m long and from a lower part of the chain. It yielded at about 7 MN, and fractured in the shank at a stress of about 770 MPa. The yield stress in the shank was about 520 MPa, and the failed eye bar showed ductile behaviour with a reducti

As DA comments, this family is such an odd and varied collection that it doesn't have a common name [p. 170]. Its most familiar member (after which the family is named) is the raccoon, but the 19 species that comprise the family include mammals as diverse in habits and feeding preferences as the raccoon dog, the kinkajou and the red panda.

There is considerable taxonomic controversy about the members of the raccoon family - including the status of the red panda. With the kinkajou, early

This course begins with some explanations of culture and discussion of how to distinguish between national and organisational culture. Reading what some well-known writers on organisational and national culture have to say will help you recognise some of the main dimensions of culture and reinforces that all of us, including organisations, construct different views of the world as a result of cultural influences. Thus culture plays a key role in the ways in which organisations perceive the en

The second cluster of common-sense ideas about poverty centre around the theme that the character and behaviour of some types of people causes them to be poor. Such people are in some way ‘flawed’. There may, of course, be different types of flaw, but poor people are distinguished from the rest of ‘us’ by some characteristic that makes ‘them’ poor. This might be their moral character (they are lazy, shiftless, workshy); it might be their abilities or capacities (they cannot budget

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Design thinking Are you ever frustrated with something that you thought you could design better? Design thinking can structure your natural creativity to come up with solutions to all kinds of problems, and have fun in the process too! First published on Thu, 22 Dec 2011 as Author(s): Creator not set

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In computer code, one may want to formulate an expression to achieve some particular purpose, such as to express some condition about the states of variables involved in the code. For example, suppose that you want to express the condition that a sequence s contains at least two members, and that the second member of s is not the space character (with ASCII code 32). This condition holds when the expression below is true.

(SIZE(s) > IntAuthor(s): The Open University

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Another situation where we use infix notation is in writing comparisons, such as x < y, where x and y are numbers. Such a comparison is either true or false. For example, 5 < 9 is true but 5 < 2 is false. To describe a corresponding function, we take the output set to be Bool = {true, false}. Thus the comparison < on integers corresponds to a function, which we can describe as follows.

function (infix) (x < Int yon

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The idea of a binary operation, and the use of infix notation, is not confined to numbers. Infix notation may be used for any process with two inputs from the same set. We look now at two binary operations on Boolean values that are often used.

The first of these takes two Boolean values, and returns true if both of the input values are true and returns false otherwise. It is a binary operation, and we shall write it using the infix notation ∧, where the sy

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